Conveyancing to go online under Veyo name

Residential conveyancing in England and Wales will go online next spring via a Law Society-backed website called Veyo, the company behind the venture reveals today.

Elliott Vigar, chief executive, is due to unveil the brand of the long-awaited e-conveyancing system at the Property Law conference in London this afternoon.

He says Veyo is a ‘market-changing product’ which will handle conveyancing from instruction to post-completion.

Veyo, which will be marketed as ‘the home of conveyancing’, will allow solicitors and licensed conveyancers to share information and documents with purchasers, HM Land Registry and, eventually, HM Revenue & Customs, mortgage lenders. and estate agents.

All documentation for each transaction will be kept online, in one system that will track activity and progress and issue automatic reminders of actions.

The only step that will still need to be carried out on paper is signing the deeds, thanks to Land Registry’s legal requirement for a ‘wet signature’, Vigar told the Gazette.

Buyers and sellers will be able to track their transaction via an app on a mobile phone.

Veyo is the brand name of a joint venture between the Law Society and IT services giant Mastek. It is chaired by Desmond Hudson, former chief executive of the Law Society, which picked up the e-conveyancing baton after Land Registry abandoned its own programme in 2009.

The system is due to go live at the end of the first quarter of 2015 and be integrated with Land Registry systems and a consumer-facing site from day one. Integration with HMRC for stamp duty land tax will come in a later release.

It will be open to licensed conveyancers as well as solicitors and in the future ‘any other regulated professional’ approved to offer conveyancing services, Vigar said. ’The more people who are on board the better. We want it to be viral.’

Every user will be individually approved, Vigar said. The system will provide an audit trail of communications between all parties in a transaction, which will strengthen risk-management and compliance, cutting the risk of fraud.

A ‘significant number’ of firms have expressed an interest in testing the system, he said, which is designed with the Law Society’s conveyancing protocol ‘hard-wired’ in.

‘We can’t create a system that is exactly the same as every one in use today, but we can create one that is familiar to practitioners,' Vigar said. ‘They’ll see a process which they recognise and are comfortable with.’

The portal will come with its own case management system but Veyo will also offer kits for integration with leading case management systems.

Vigar said that charges for the system are have not yet been decided. ‘The model will be built around a licence fee and a transaction fee but we are not in a position to come up with numbers,’ he said.